El Arte de lo Grotesco
2019 · 14m
Directed by Santiago Carmona Herrera
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
Bastián, obsessed with dark-haired women, is driven by a cursed painting at home to murder the women he seduces, until he meets Selene, who knows the painting's story and turns his nightmares against him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A possessed-painting-drives-man-to-murder setup that could've been paint-by-numbers Gothic, except Herrera flips it: the victim becomes the architect of her own revenge through pure knowledge of the curse's history. That's the kind of subversive gender inversion that makes tired tropes actually *mean* something.
Carmona Herrera situates this clearly within the Spanish Gothic and surrealist traditions—there's Buñuel in the dreamlogic, Varo in the painting itself as narrative engine—but the film earns its formal sophistication through restraint rather than decoration, letting the surrealism serve the psychological architecture.
The single choice that makes this work: using the painting not as decoration but as a character whose visual language—what it *shows* Bastián—becomes the film's visual grammar, so by the time Selene invokes it, we're already inside its logic rather than watching it happen.